Clarissa Inihao, wife of PO3 Inihao, receives her relatives at her husband’s wake at their residence in Barangay Babag. She says he was a dedicated police officer who worried over the safety of his family before his own. (CDN PHOTO/NORMAN MENDOZA)
An alleged key personality of a Mactan-based drug syndicate, which was linked to Friday’s slaying of a Lapu-Lapu City policeman and the wounding of another, was killed before dawn on Saturday in a shootout with policemen out to arrest him.
Joel Oyao Amistad, 43, allegedly a member of the “Oyao Drug Group” operating on Mactan Island and was suspected to be among those behind the killing of PO3 Antonio Inihao Jr., was to be served an arrest warrant on an unrelated pending drug case in Barangay Agus, Lapu-Lapu City when he resisted arrest and fought it out with arresting policemen, said Insp. Alcon Escusora, chief of the Marigondon Police Station in Lapu-Lapu City.
Escusora said policemen knocked on the door of Amistad’s house at around 3:50 a.m., introduced themselves as police officers and instructed the latter to come out. But all of a sudden,
Amistad fired at them, prompting the police to return fire, hitting Amistad in different parts of the body.
Amistad was rushed to the Lapu-Lapu City Hospital but he died before he got there, said Escusora.
According to Lapu-Lapu police investigators, there was no clear evidence yet that Amistad was behind the slaying of Inihao.
What was clear was that the killing of Inihao was “one hundred percent drug related” and evidences pointed to the Oyao drug group as the syndicate behind the assassination, said Escusora.
Operatives from the Lapu-Lapu City Police Office’s Maridongon and Hoops Dome stations, along with Philippine National Police-Central Visayas regional intelligence division led by Supt. Rex
Derilo, took part in the operation to get Amistad, using a pending arrest warrant that was issued against him over a drug-related case in 2015.
The police had hoped to get Amistad alive as he would have been a key in determining who ordered the kill on Inihao, police sources said.
Inihao, an intelligence operative for the Marigondon police station, had been behind the series of anti-drug operations in the city in December last year that resulted to the arrest of a number of drug dealers in Lapu-Lapu City.
He and another policeman, PO3 Jasper Nuñez, were conducting an anti-drug surveillance operation in Sitio Sunlot, Barangay Calawisan of the city at noon Friday when he was shot six times in the back and chest by unknown assailants.
Nuñez, who was equally injured, is now out of danger and being treated in an undisclosed hospital in Cebu, according to police sources.
Escusora said police recovered from Amistad’s possession a .357 revolver with two fired cartridge and three live ammunition at its cylinder.
Amistad’s son, Khien, 18, was also arrested and now detained at the city police headquarters after he was found inside a room in the house with 42 small plastic sachets and one medium pack of suspected shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) worth P78,500 and some drug paraphernalia, Escusora said.
Amistad’s wife, Arlene, and their two minor children were found hiding on the second floor of their house and were not hurt, added Escusora.
Amistad’s father, Antonio, 69, meanwhile, insisted he was told that his son was already about to surrender when the police operatives allegedly made him run and then shot him.
“Niisa na man kuno siya sa iyang kamot pero gipadagan sa police ug gipusil,” claimed Antonio.
(I learned my son already raised his hands but the policemen let him run and shot him.)
Antonio lived separately from his son and said he did not know the nature of his work but maintained the latter was not involved in illegal drug trade.
Khien, when interviewed by Cebu Daily News at his detention cell at the Lapu-Lapu City Police Office, said his father fired first at the policemen and was hit when the policemen fired back.
“Siya ra man ang nigawas. Kami didto ra sa kwarto (He was the only one who went out of the house. We all stayed inside the room),” he said.
He also admitted his father didn’t have a job and earned a living allegedly by selling “butang”, supposedly the crime world’s reference to illegal drugs.
“Wala man siya’y trabaho, mobaligya lang og butang (He didn’t have a job, he only sold drugs),” the son said.